GLOBAL WARNING

The Kilinailau Islands—also known as the Tulun
Islands, or the Carteret Atoll—which lie four hundred
miles from the coast of Papua New Guinea, are tiny,
low, and impoverished. Their fate, thanks to global
warming, has long been a foregone conclusion. In 1995,
most of the shoreline of Piul and Huene washed away,
and the island of Iolasa was cut in half by the sea.
Saltwater intrusion has now reached the point where
islanders can no longer grow breadfruit, and have to
rely on emergency food aid. Last month, Reuters
reported that the decision had finally been made to
give up. The islands’ two thousand residents are being
relocated, at the expense of the Papua New Guinean
government, to the slightly higher ground of
Bougainville Island, some sixty miles to the southwest.

The atoll’s evacuation fits into a pattern of grim, if
unsurprising, news. In September, the area of Arctic
sea ice shrank to a record low, prompting glaciologists
to conclude that the ice had entered a state of
"accelerating, long-term decline," and to warn that at
the current rate of loss the Arctic Ocean would be ice-
free in summer "well before the end of this century."
At about the same time, a team of researchers at the
University of Colorado announced that the extent of
surface melt on the Greenland ice sheet had reached a
new high, and a second team of researchers, at Georgia
Tech, reported that the number of Category 4 and
Category 5 hurricanes had nearly doubled in the past
three decades. Global temperatures, meanwhile,
continued their steady upward climb; 2005 is on track
to be the hottest year since record-keeping began, in
the late eighteen-hundreds. (Eight of the ten hottest
years on record have occurred since 1996.)

These events are the all too relevant backdrop for the
current round of international climate talks taking
place in Montreal. The talks are the first since the
Kyoto Protocol entered into force, this past February.
Technically, the United States, not being a party to
the protocol, will be excluded from many of the
sessions in Montreal. But, by virtue of its
contribution to climate change—Americans produce
nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas
emissions—it will still have a great deal of influence
on what does, and does not, get accomplished there.

When the Bush Administration’s policy on climate change
was first articulated by the President, in early 2002,
critics described it as a "total charade," a
characterization that, if anything, has come to seem
too generous. Stripped down to its essentials, the
Administration’s position is that global warming is a
problem that either will solve itself or won’t. The
White House has consistently opposed taxes or
regulations or mandatory caps to reduce, or even just
stabilize, greenhouse-gas emissions, advocating instead
a purely voluntary approach, under which companies and
individuals can choose to cut their CO2 production—
that is, if they feel like it. (At the G-8 summit this
summer, the President embarrassed British Prime
Minister Tony Blair by refusing to accede even to minor
modifications in this position.) In Montreal, the
Administration’s chief climate negotiator, Harlan
Watson, has been touting the efficacy of the voluntary
approach, pointing out that between 2000 and 2003 the
United States’ carbon-dioxide emissions dropped by .8
per cent. Conveniently left out is the fact that since
2003 they have shot back up again. According to the
latest government figures, the country’s CO2 emissions
are now three per cent higher than they were three
years ago. (The brief dip, it should be noted, had
nothing to do with government policy; it was entirely a
function of the downturn in the economy.)

Much of the Montreal talks will be taken up with the
nitty-gritty of implementing Kyoto—how, for example,
to structure the "clean development mechanism," under
which industrialized countries can receive credit for
financing emissions-reducing projects in developing
ones. Such details are clearly important if the
protocol is to have an impact. But Kyoto is, and has
always been understood as, a first step, and a baby
step at that. As President Bush likes to point out, the
protocol imposes no restrictions on countries like
China and India, whose emissions are growing rapidly.
(China is expected to overtake the United States as the
world’s largest carbon emitter sometime around 2025.)
Kyoto, moreover, is a temporary measure; it lapses in
2012, at which point it will need to be replaced by
something much more ambitious. The protocol took almost
three years to negotiate and seven years to ratify; at
that rate, work on its successor should have begun back
in 2002. Many countries are pressing for post-Kyoto
talks to commence immediately. In characteristic
fashion, the Bush Administration is refusing to
participate. "The United States seeks to focus
attention on progress . . . rather than to detour
positive approaches toward a new round of negotiations"
is how Watson put it shortly after arriving in Montreal
last week.

America’s failure to ratify Kyoto is widely viewed as a
scandal. The Administration’s effort to block a post-
Kyoto agreement has received less attention, but is
every bit as dangerous. Without the participation of
the United States, no meaningful agreement can be
drafted for the post-2012 period, and the world will
have missed what may well be its last opportunity to
alter course. "If we don’t get a serious program in
place for the long term in this post-Kyoto phase, we
will simply not make it," Michael Oppenheimer, a
climate scientist at Princeton, told reporters last
month. "We will be crossing limits which will basically
produce impacts that are unacceptable." Such is the
nature of global warming that the problem is always
further along than it seems. The kinds of changes that
are now becoming evident—the rise in sea levels, the
thawing of permafrost, the acidification of the oceans,
the acceleration of ice streams—mean that much larger
changes are rapidly approaching. To continue to delay
is not to put off catastrophe but, rather, to rush
toward it.

— Elizabeth Kolbert

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051212ta_talk_kolbert